At first sight, greater flexibility and greater certainty might not seem to go naturally together on construction projects. But this is just another example of how offsite construction using Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) is rewriting the rules.
Stick to trusted design concepts and known methods and you’ll arrive at the most predictable outcome – or so conventional thinking goes. Except that time, cost and quality outcomes have tended to be anything but predictable. Budget and timing overruns and significant defect levels have become the expectation – potentially driving even greater caution, rather than ambition, when it comes to building design.
Panelised offsite is all about combining flexibility and predictability to help break the cycle of poor outcomes fuelling constrained design vision and ambition. This realisation is behind a recent announcement from the Department for Education (DfE). The DfE aims to establish a four-year framework for the delivery of school building programmes. It specifically calls for the use of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) and offsite construction methods.
The initiative is driven by the understanding of how panelised offsite delivers imaginative building projects alongside time and cost benefits. Value engineering is incorporated at each project stage to deliver better and more predictable outcomes.
Offsite is particularly suited to school building programmes because of the flexible design and installation model. These benefits make it suited to any project that requires imaginative use of space, or where it’s important to minimise disruption to existing facilities and neighbouring communities and where time is of the essence.
Digital Construction Takes Centre Stage
If, or rather when, the framework becomes a reality it will move digital construction from the margins to the centre of a high-priority area of public sector procurement.
Innovaré’s iFAST System works to a detailed 3D design model in which potential clashes and buildability issues have been resolved. This provides the greatest possible certainty that buildings will be ready for use on schedule and delivered within the agreed budget. The technology is also significantly less prone to delays caused by poor weather or shortages of materials and skilled labour.
The DfE school building framework is just one aspect of the exciting growth of DfMA and offsite methods. It’s a technology whose time has come, and customers and main contractors are looking for partners with proven offsite expertise. Many are finding the Innovaré integrated design to installation service particularly welcome.
Contact us today on 0845 674 0020 to find out how we can help.
